we are all activists now thank you
I'll just stop here from the families
who are fighting to maintain funding for
public schools the tens of thousands of
people who joined Occupy Wall Street or
marched with black lives matter to
protest police brutality against
african-americans families that join
rallies pro-life and pro-choice those of
us who are afraid that our friends and
neighbors are going to be deported or
that they'll be added to lists because
they are Muslim people who advocate for
gun rights and for gun control and the
millions of people who join the women's
marches all across the country this past
January we are all activists now and
that means that we all have something to
worry about from surveillance
surveillance means government collection
and use of private and sensitive data
about us and surveillance is essential
to law enforcement and to national
security but the history of surveillance
is one that includes surveillance abuses
where this sensitive information has
been used against people because of
their race their national origin their
sexual orientation and in particular
because of their activism their
political beliefs about 53 years ago dr.
Martin Luther King jr. gave his I have a
dream speech on the mall in Washington
and today the ideas behind this speech
of racial equality and tolerance are so
non-controversial that my daughter's
study the speech in third grade but at
the time dr. King was extremely
controversial the legendary and
notorious FBI director J Edgar Hoover
believed or wanted to believe that the
civil rights movement was a Soviet
communist plot in ten
to destabilize the American government
and so Hoover had his agents put bugs in
dr. King's hotel rooms and those bugs
picked up conversations between civil
rights leaders talking about the
strategies and tactics of the civil
rights movement they also picked up
sounds of dr. King having sex with women
who were not his wife and J Edgar Hoover
saw the opportunity here to discredit
and undermine the civil rights movement
the FBI sent a package of these
recordings along with a handwritten note
to dr. King pans a draft of this note
was found in FBI archives years later
and the letter said you are no clergyman
and you know it King like all frauds
your end is approaching the letter even
seemed to encourage dr. King to commit
suicide saying King there is only one
thing left for you to do you know what
it is you better take it before your
filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared
to the nation but the important thing is
dr. King was not abnormal every one of
us has something that we want to hide
from somebody and even more important J
Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either the
history of surveillance abuses is not
the history of one bad megalomaniacal
man throughout his decades at the FBI
j.edgar hoover enjoyed the support of
the presidents that he served Democratic
and Republican alike after all it was
John F Kennedy and his brother Robert
Kennedy who knew about and approved the
surveillance of dr. King Hoover ran a
program called COINTELPRO for 15 years
which was designed to spy on and
undermine civic groups that were devoted
to things like civil rights the women's
rights movement and peace groups and
anti-war movements and the surveillance
didn't stop there
Lyndon Baines Johnson during the
election campaign
the campaign airplane of his rival Barry
Goldwater bugged as part of his effort
to win that election and then of course
there was Watergate burglars were caught
breaking into the Democratic National
Committee headquarters at the Watergate
Hotel the Nixon administration was
involved in covering up the burglary and
eventually Nixon had to step down as
president COINTELPRO and Watergate were
a wake-up call for Americans
surveillance was out of control
and it was being used to squelch
political challengers and so Americans
rose to the occasion and what we did was
we reformed surveillance law and the
primary tool we used to reform
surveillance law was to require a search
warrant for the government to be able to
get access to our phone calls and our
letters now the reason why a search
warrant is important is because it
interposes a judge in the relationship
between investigators and the citizens
and that judges job is to make sure that
there's good cause for the surveillance
that the surveillance is targeted at the
right people and that the information
that's collected is going to be used for
legitimate government purposes and not
for discriminatory ones this this was
our system and what this means is that
President Obama did not wiretap Trump
Tower the system is set up to prevent
something like that from happening
without a judge being involved but what
happens when we're not talking about
phone calls or letters anymore today we
have technology that makes it cheap and
easy for the government to collect
information on ordinary everyday people
your phone call records can reveal
whether you have an addiction what your
religion is what charities you donate to
what political candidate you support and
yet our government collected drag nets
Americans calling records for years in
2012 the Republican National Convention
highlighted a new technology it was
planning to use facial recognition to
identify people who are going to be in
the crowd who might be activists or
troublemakers and to stop them ahead of
time today over 50% of American adults
have their face print in a government
database the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
Firearms and Explosives concocted a plan
to find out what Americans were going to
gun shows by using license-plate
detectors to scan the license plates of
cars that were in the parking lots of
these events today we believe that over
70% of police departments have automatic
license plate detection technology that
they're using to track people's cars as
they drive through town and all of this
information the license plates the face
prints the phone records your address
books
your buddy lists the photos that you
upload to Dropbox or Google photos and
sometimes even your chats and your
emails are not protected by a warrant
requirement so what that means is we
have all of this information on regular
people that's newly available at very
low expense it is the golden age for
surveillance now every parent's going to
understand what this means when you have
a little baby and the baby's young that
child is not able to climb out of its
crib but eventually your little girl
gets older and she's able to climb out
of the crib but you tell her don't climb
out of the crib okay and every parent
knows what's gonna happen some of those
babies are going to climb out of the
crib right that's the difference between
ability and permission well the same
thing is true with the government today
it used to be that our government didn't
have the ability to do widespread
massive surveillance on hundreds of
millions of Americans and then abuse
that information but now our governments
grown-up and we have that technology
today the government had the ability and
that means the law is more important
than ever before
the law is supposed to say when the
government has permission to do it and
it's supposed to ensure that there's
some kind of ramification we notice when
those laws are broken and there's some
kind of ramification or punishment the
law is more important than ever because
we are now living in a world where only
rules are stopping the government from
abusing this information but the law has
fallen down on the job particularly
since September 11th the law has fallen
down on the job and we do not have the
rules in place that we need and we are
seeing the ramifications of that so
fusion centers are these joint task
forces between local state and federal
government that are meant to ferret out
domestic terrorism and what we've seen
is fusion Center reports that say that
if you you might be dangerous if you
voted for a third party candidate or you
own a don't tread on me flag or you
watch movies that are anti-tax these
same fusion centers have spied on Muslim
community groups reading lists and on
Quakers who are resisting military
recruiting and high schools the Internal
Revenue Service has disproportionately
audited groups that have tea party or
Patriot in their name and now Customs
and Border Patrol is stopping people as
they come into the country and demanding
our social networking passwords which
will allow them to see who our friends
are what we say and even to impersonate
us online now civil libertarians like
myself have been trying to draw people's
attention to these things and fighting
against them for years this was a huge
problem during the Obama administration
but now the problem is worse when the
New York Police Department spies on
Muslims or a police department uses life
plate detectors to find out where the
officers spouses are those sorts of
things that is extremely dangerous but
when a president
repurposes the power of federal
surveillance in the federal government
to retaliate against political
opposition that is a tyranny and so we
are all activists now and we all have
something to fear from surveillance but
just like in the time of dr. Martin
Luther King we can reform the way things
are first of all use encryption
encryption protects your information
from being inexpensively and
opportunistically collected it rolls
back the golden age for surveillance
second support surveillance reform did
you know that if you have a friend who
works for the French or German
government or for an international human
rights group or for a global oil company
that your friend is a valid foreign
intelligence target and what that means
is that when you have conversations with
that friend the US government may be
collecting that information and when
that information is collected even
though it's conversations with Americans
it can then be funneled to the FBI where
the FBI is allowed to search through it
without getting a warrant without
probable cause looking for information
about Americans and whatever crimes we
may have committed with no need to
document any kind of suspicion the law
that allows some of this to happen is
called section 702 of the FISA
Amendments Act and we have a great
opportunity this year because section
702 is going to expire at the end of
2017 which means that Congress's inertia
is on our side if we want reform and we
can pressure our representatives to
actually implement important reforms to
this law and protect our data from this
redirection and miss you
and finally one of the reasons why
things have gotten so out of control is
because so much of what happens with
surveillance the technology the enabling
rules and the policies that are either
there or not there to protect us our
secret or classified we need
transparency and we need to know as
Americans what the government is doing
in our name so that the surveillance
that takes place and the use of that
information is democratically accounted
for we are all activists now which means
that we all have something to worry
about from surveillance but like in the
time of dr. Martin Luther King there is
stuff that we can do about it so please
join me and let's get to work
thank you
[Music]